Software for the People - Knowledge Management Research Center Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist who studies how people use IT. In her job as a principal research scientist with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Agilent Technologies, she helps design software that people actually want to use because it takes into account the way they work and communicate. She finds that technologies such as instant messaging and e-mail are popular precisely because they facilitate relationships among people who aren't connected by a line on the corporate org chart. Technology, Nardi believes, should above all be "useful."